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It's a particularly upbeat edition of The Fonecast this week, with European roaming charges falling, a universal phone charger on the horizon and mobile video uploads on the increase. Coming back down to earth, we also take a look at some of the problems facing mobile payments in the UK.

It’s the battle of the roaming charges. With the EU’s new capped call and text charges coming into effect from tomorrow, the UK’s networks are introducing increasingly attractive data deals. First came 3 with a data roaming charge of £1.25 per MB, which it described as the UK’s best ever standard data roaming rate. Now comes Vodafone with a charge of £4.99 per day for up to 25MB of mobile data across the EU.

A survey by Lightspeed Research shows that 11% of respondents in the UK and 13% of people in the USA never make calls from their mobile phones. An additional 33% of UK respondents and 18% of US respondents make no more than two mobile calls a week.

Mind you, that doesn’t mean they don’t use text or data services. For example, 49% of UK users send at least one SMS text message per day and 2% send a daily picture message. When it comes to other functions, 9% browse the mobile web every day and 38% take photos every week.